


Four (Lives?)

by StarOverHeaven



Series: grief and anger stew bitterness [1]
Category: Minecraft (Video Game), Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Do not post to another site, Gen, Mental Health Issues, body horror?, mental degredation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-25
Updated: 2021-02-25
Packaged: 2021-03-16 05:08:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29695521
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StarOverHeaven/pseuds/StarOverHeaven
Summary: What if there were side effects to failing/not completing the resurrection ritual?Inspired by The Caretakers “Everywhere at the end of time” (Specifically, I listened to primarily Stage 4 when writing this, up to and including “temporary bliss state”)
Series: grief and anger stew bitterness [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2184792
Comments: 3
Kudos: 14





	Four (Lives?)

**Author's Note:**

> Note: this is meant to be deliberately confusing to read, as the thoughts of the character are designed to be read this way for this.

The figure standing at the edge of the crater was fuzzy at the edges, a splash of yellow in a field of grays. The scent of gunpowder and ash laid thick in the air, burning fur and blood. Scraps of gray fluff blew in the wind, pinks and reds smeared across the rubble drying to browns and dark stains. 

The faded ghost of L’manberg stood at the edge of what remained, unmoving. Others had long retreated, licking wounds and grieving. The smoking remains of a tree stump stood on the other side of the crater, an empty scar of something that could have been. A betrayal that lingered emptily in a place of nothingness, a nail slammed down on a wound already fatal. 

Empty eyes searched the stones for a scrap of anything recognizable, lingering on the remains of something he had once known. There is no reflection in these eyes, merely an eerie blankness of anything, fading white. Blue drips from unmoving lips, an unbeating heart still as the smoldering rubble. 

A burning page is sent flying in the wind. 

There is nothing for him here. 

Still, he searches. Listens. There is no blue fluff to greet him, warm eyes encapsulated in a friendly puff of love. There are no dark gray wings to surround him this time, to block the scent of gunpowder with tears and blood-ash. No songs leak from his lips, his tongue long forgetting the tune of something he’d once known as he knew himself. 

He listens, and hears only the stuttering, broken sound of a symphony decayed in time and memory. There is nothing for him, nothing of him. 

His heart was in L’manberg. His body, his bones - scattered in the rubble, shards of something to be forgotten. Blue blood leaks from his lips, and his wound is icy in his chest despite the remembered flame of a blade. 

The song in his head is wrong. Broken, sampled, fragmented, played off-key and off-tune and scrambled in white noise and the crackliness of scratches records played over and over until they knew no song but the rips in what they had been. His voice catches brokenly on empty lungs that no longer breathe, on his tongue that is made of picks and hooks that catch on the roof of his mouth. 

If Wilbur had heard her symphony once, now all he could hear was the broken keening of something that had once been. Familiar enough to recognize, but so strangely right-wrong that the nostalgia once felt for the sounds of it had been compromised into something so incredibly incorrect that the muscles in his spine spasmed on shards of bone and fragments of signals his mind had once sent. 

_Decaying._

L’manbergs symphony was inescapable. A backdrop in his head, it followed him no matter where he went. A crackly old record that hiss-hummed in his head, warbling like a dying thing. The flag placed in her corpse stood weakly in the rubble, hung in vines and rot. 

Wilbur licked the back of his teeth and tasted blood on the memory of the texture of his enamel. His fingertips ached, his spine twitching even though he remained still. Muscle spasms of a dying thing, left to rot in the sun and fade until everything hardened and the sinew grew tight. 

“Wilbur? What are you doing here?” 

The voice is familiar, and it’s what makes Wilbur turn his head. Orange and white hair, sharp eyes. Familiarity is quick in it’s leaving, and his eyes are dragged away back to the crater. An inevitable outcome. Blood drips thick from his tongue, and he can feel it bubble up the back of his throat, up through his nasal passages and out his nose like a worm squirming through his flesh. 

Distantly, Wilbur wonders if Schlatt could feel every moment the teeth sank into his heart, flesh pulverised and swallowed. He wonders if he felt every moment he was pulled apart like hounds were given his corpse. He wonders if the aching chill he felt was every piece of his scattered dust and shards of bone was him feeling the cold wind as it funneled into the crater to blow them up and away into the clouds and ash that lingered above her grave. 

“Listening.” He says, and his voice is raspy and warped, a record played off-key. 

“To what?” The stranger Wilbur knew once asks, and there’s a wariness in the tone that Wilbur doesn’t register. 

“Her symphony, my symphony.” Wilbur whispers, head tilting and eyes closing as she hummed with her forever-final breathes in his ears, like a lullaby half-forgotten in time. He thinks of better days, of sun and faces he barely remembers. He thinks of better afters, of the void as it crept into his soul slowly, seeping into the cracks and holes he’d made of himself as he slowly melted into its embrace. 

Wilbur was so tired. He wanted to go back, meet the embrace of the inevitable as an old friend and lover and hope. He wanted to curl into the dark emptiness, feel it dissolve his skin and eyes and tongue and throat and heart and soul until there was nothing left of him to _feel_ anymore. Until he was nonexistent, just another star humming in the endless inevitability of _nothing_. 

He missed being nothing. He missed being happy, a lie, yellow sweater smiles and blue blood thick on his fingers where he pushed them into the wound when things became bad. When people would look at him and lie because they wanted him to be happy, not to hurt him. He wants to go back, to be young again when his family was all warm and nobody hurt. He wants to comfort, yet what comfort was he when all he could think of was his body, scattered apart like his thoughts, forgotten and blown away in the breeze of the wind in the ashes of the thing he’d… 

Something. The thought fell apart, a leaf in wind. Ungraspable. Used to losing his train of thought, he tries to think of something else. Tries to focus on the present. The sun through the thick gray clouds, the ash that lingered. The vague pressure of wind, half-caught on his half-corporeal body as it passed through and around him simultaneously. 

He missed the smell of gunpowder and blood and the steel iron cut hurt terribly bad of war. Teeth sunk into the flesh of his arm when the screaming in his head was too long, debating chewing away until he was nothing so he didn’t hear the shrieks of her dying in his head. Stone tight around him, darkness under his eyes and the bone that his skin pulled tight around at his wrist. Meatless, wasting away in all ways - a choice, in some. Not in others.. 

He didn’t miss Tommy’s song, loud and warm and brash turning chilled and cold and shy, sharp notes that faded into shivery, long hums of terror. Techno’s steady beat and warm hums, sharp notes dulled in care hidden under bravado. Phil’s song of empty cold void and tiredness, sleepy lullabies and hot cocoa molded into notes of warmth in chilly nights. 

Wilbur misses the songs of his loved ones curling happily in his head as much as they terrify some part of him that is afraid of what he had was become will be. Misses the days when he couldn’t hear his own song, rotting away. Misses the days when he didn’t sacrifice half his symphony to hear her sing, only to realize L’manberg had become part of him he would never be able to forget. 

Her symphony is haunting. So loud. He calls it hers, but part of him knows its not - part of him whispers _that’s you, your song. You’re rotting away, rotting rotting rotting just like you should monstrous traitor betrayer villain -_

When he breathes, the sound rattles oddly in his chest. He opens his eyes. 

The sky is dark, and a tiny cloud floats by. Time has passed. He reaches for the memories and finds nothing, and he turns away lethargically. His feet are warm, and he does not move. He looks down. 

There is red. Wilbur blinks slowly, then lifts his head and turns away, stepping away from the blood-red warm-hum. L’manbergs symphony warps in his head, a warbling rattling breathing of a dead thing. He hums her tune obediently, and travels without feeling anything. He misses living, the touch of grass and the warmth of the sun. Everything is half-there, now. Faded. A liar’s touch, that’s what his was. His tongue curled around a lyric, already forgotten and left behind in his footsteps that always circle him back to that place. 

The safety. Remembered things of sharp corners, of knife-carved words. Memories and lyrics written in stone literally, the blood of his palms where he grabbed the knife too harshly or focused too much. An anchorpoint, a gravitational pull to where his heart had stopped long before his mind had dimmed, the fading embers of a fire extinguished. 

He feels weight in his chest. A spasming sort of thing that isn’t supposed to exist. A feeling of bone and organs torn asunder, leaving an emptiness that the human body is never supposed to be aware of. Like his heart that he no longer has which no longer beats is slung from his rib cage in string and rotting things, and his mind is a fuzz of white noise, cut songs and a warbling drone of ever-encroaching madness. 

The void is empty silence. Living is like everything around him is _screaming._ His jaw aches, a clench of teeth. His blood fizzles in his non-existent veins, bubbling blue like powder dust electrified and liquified. It bubbles from his fingertips and his lips, bleeds from his nose and ears and eyes like a disease. 

A rotting body of a ghost, wrong and spasming. He can feel the hooks of resurrection in his skin, his throat. They tug him towards living, but there is nothing there, a ritual half-completed and left to rot. This isn’t the easy one-two-three of the living, as simple as brain-start-heart-start-breathe-new. This isn’t waking in a bed. 

This is a shrieking wrongness. He isn’t supposed to exist, anchorless and drifting, half-resurrected and left between a state of not-existing and living and being dead. 

He can hear the very fabric of reality shivering. Can hear it struggling to recognize his existence, a note keyed so wrongly into reality that even the void won’t touch it. 

Four. Four. Four. Lives? _no_

Wilbur crumples, muscles he doesn’t have spasming. He lives but doesn’t. His heart that doesn’t exist pulses in his chest, squeezing tightly until his lungs he doesn’t have stutter and rip. For a split second, he _lives -_ agony, unparalleled. He feels air rush through the holes in his lungers, his throat raw and bleeding. Red spatters to the ground as his whole body spasms in a cough, his brain instinctively pulling the strings on his brief existence as a body he has that doesn’t exist but _does_ struggles to breathe. 

His lips drip thick and black, red and blue and void. His tongue is coated, a sticky liquid of iron and dust, the velvet of flower petals. 

Then in the brief blink of time that he lives, he no longer does. 

He stares, feels his hands spasm against the dirt. It is cold. The grass straightens back up, phasing through his fingers once more. The tiny, harmless life force that they exist with is magma-hot against the dry-ice freezing-cold of false reanimation. 

Getting up is cumbersome. He feels like he weighs more than an ocean, and when he does stand he stumbles. Red stains his chin. He wipes at it with his hand, head heavy as it tilts towards the floor. The songs warble in his ears, and without thinking he bites through his tongue to stifle a shriek that wants to pull from his lungs. 

Nothing happens. He unclenches his teeth, and feels at his tongue with his fingers, some half-remembered memory of pain unanswered in reality. His hand is cold. He looks at it, and sees how his very image seems to _drip,_ color leaking from him like an oil painting in the rain. It never seems to touch the ground, peeling off in bubbles and fading away. 

The void is swallowing him, but not fast enough. It cannot counter the anchoring pull of the threads of the unfinished ritual that ties him to the land of the living. He aches to rest. 

His cheeks are wet, weeping, and he touches them gently. There is no warmth, no temperature at all. His hands stain blue, but it fizzes against his skin like acid as reality rejects his ability to touch and feel and _exist._

“What is happening to me?” He wonders, his voice a warbling thing of half-consumed tape. 

_Something isn’t right,_ he thinks, and thinks, and thinks without thinking. 

Time is so strange. 

His memories aren’t right. 

He remembers, distantly, a cave. Lanterns held carefully, some iron and blackened with soot and others of paper and warm thoughts. Blue wool knit into carpets to cover a cold floor in a cabin of snow and warm fires. Voices warped, half-forgotten yet so achingly familiar. 

It takes him a long while to realize he is going deaf, in a way. The songs aren’t so loud, cutting in and out like a radio struggling to tune in. He listens as they fade in and out of static, never ceasing yet never playing. Some days he wakes from a fugue state in a place of wood and home, only to later realize he was living a day in a memory turned fuzzy where the edges don’t match. Other days he wakes with blood filling his lungs, struggling to breathe in the sharp second-split moments of being alive but not being alive at all, body spasming in and out of existence as fast as a blink as his blood drips red and hot and _alive_. 

The crater hums. He walks over vines, feels their heat burning-hot and not-right. They whisper to him, but he can’t hear what they are saying. It’s like a language he can’t understand - words, not music. He doesn’t get what they want. So he ignores them until the radio goes darker, lighter notes becoming heavy and droning when he gets too near. 

He doesn’t like it. 

The sounds slowly strangle the others. It’s a drowning drone, swallowing all it touches in a hold that seems nice but becomes terrible. It is a monstrous thing, pretending to be good. 

Yet it feels so achingly familiar. 

The songs he hears are all so familiar. Nostalgia pools tight in his gut like a parasite. Warm memories become gnawing, a hungry thing that chews at the empty flesh of his insides. 

Sometimes there are moments of silence. Lucidity, or remembered notes and pieces of good songs. Sometimes he can listen, and respond. Sometimes he swears he hears voices in the distance, familiar and warm. Sometimes he responds. 

Mostly he becomes more tired. 

Sometimes he wakes, brief moments at a place of grays and blues and yellows. Slowly, red overtakes this place. He smells gunpowder, feels sand between his teeth and blood drip thick as it fizzles and bubbles and boils. Melted flesh in a wound. A hunger that slowly gnaws, an emptiness. 

He wants to _listen._ Hear the songs again, not these falsities that slowly turn the nail in the back of his skull. His mind feels… his skull is cracking, under it. He can feel every note make it larger, his tongue tied into something that curls into the back of his throat like a snake to choke him. 

His screams are muffled through his own flesh. 

He’s so hungry. 

But the endless agony of half-living is worth it. Sometimes the lucidity comes, clearness of thought he had struggled to have at all in true-life coming cleaner in not-life. He is not alive, he recognizes during these lucid points. He speaks, and his words come clear. He sings, and it reminds him of days in a cave with his fingers pulling at his hairline in desperation. 

There’s something wrong. 

He screams, and it chokes in his throat like bile. He bites at the things that tie him, but they do not give. He is always pulled pulled pulled, unforgiveness and teeth and eyes. He remembers _blue blue blue like their eyes remember them they are tommy phil techno tubbo you remember please remember don't forget them not again head htutgs ? why ? ap idn is jnso mabd das?Ds??D.?b,b,.v.xcxmvvvvvvv\ccnnc_

His thoughts are droned out, like something gets stuck and breaks. A key that won't stop playing, repeating itself brokenly over the droning hum of thoughts that he can’t even begin to think of properly. He thinks, but doesn’t know what he thinks. The hums drone it out, cut notes shutting out any reasonable behaviour like something getting stuck, trapped in a broken loop of self-destructing. Short cuts of lucidity in the rot are silence, but even the silence hums like a fan with a broken bearing - deafeningly loud, when you become aware of it. A vibrating shaking, like the world beneath a corpse forgotten in stone and madness that claws tight, unforgiven and left to stay that way. 

There is no gravestone. 

L’manberg is his grave. 

He stands at the edge and watches the red creep closer. The lapis is a respite. The red comes closer. The red comes closer. It swallows, swallows, swallows, a droning hum of broken-cut-wrong-hum-static-sound-closer-coming-what?- _what?-awhaT?_

In a brief moment of lucidity, Wilbur wakes from his half-awake half-asleep state. Sleep paralysis abated by an instinctive urge, one of dying things to go where the rot and sickness won’t poison those they know. He stands from where he had crumpled, a memory of blade and pain and horns forgotten as he slowly trudged away. A sheep baa’d warily, left alone as the half-decayed spirit wandered. 

Friend bit through his lead, and followed. 

And followed. 

And followed even further still, as the stumbling spirit finally crumpled to a stillness. The river is freezing cold, staining blue where the spirit’s stained hand is slowly worn away in the current. Ice forms around the edges of his fingertips. The sheep, ever present, gently gathers a limp wrist into its mouth to pull it from the river. The hand does not move when it touches it with its soft nose, but Friend doesn’t mind. 

Instead the sheep curls up with its friend, recognizing the need for comfort. The dying spirit moves achingly slowly, curling into the warmth of the wool offered. Friend licks at Wilbur’s hair and huffs. Spirits do not have much of a scent, and so it is telling that the sheep can smell the rotting sickness slowly overcoming its friend. 

Dying things do not often last long, but Friend is fine with waiting. 

There is a terror in all living things of death, and so it recognizes this, and wishes to comfort a passing of something close. 

But Friend does not realize Wilbur is not afraid of death. 

Terminally ill things do not fear death, nor passing - some, in fact, crave it. In this way, Wilbur has always never feared death - he did not fear it in his living moments, when he became aware of his faltering mind. When the paranoia grew, and he struggled to tell friend from foe. He did not fear death - _craved it,_ the release it would give him from the song that had sunk into him like the teeth of a great predator into the skull of prey, caving in on his brain until all that was left bled thick and became infected with a rot incurable. 

The spirit that Wilbur had become, Ghostbur or Wilbur or whatever he was now, was not afraid of death either. 

Wilbur craved the rest that would come. In his lucid state, the agony of realization was the worst and best. He recognizes, fully and immediately, that he is dying. Again. But it isn’t a quick passing, comfortable and sharp and surrounded in warm feathers and tears. It is a slow thing, rotting. A ritual left uncompleted, pulling and pulling until he is exhausted. 

The void consumes, and the ritual pulls him from its embrace. Trapped in an inbetween state, neither living nor dead. Neither awake nor sleeping, a coma that is more akin to sleep paralysis. An awareness of the rot that is slowly consuming yet can never consume, memories becoming distant and songs once memorized becoming unfamiliar and strange. 

Wilbur’s tears are blue. They stain Friend’s wool, unnoticed. The snow settles over them, and Friend’s soft sniffling allows Wilbur to sleep, lucidity fading into a fugue state. 

Friend does not leave him, for all that it matters. At least, never for long. 

It isn’t so lonely. 

Wilbur appreciates that. 

**Author's Note:**

> Also featured: an idea that instead of just voices like Techno/Phil, Wilbur hears “songs” that he associates with people. Also featured: him hearing his own song as he goes mad and disassociating himself from it.
> 
> This came to me while I was listening to "Stage Four" of the "Everywhere At The End Of Time" album by The Caretaker, and I wrote it then immediately posted it. This is raw, unedited 4am thought processing based on the idea of "What if there were side effects to failing/not completing the resurrection ritual?" as a basic prompt, and I wrote it while actively listening meaning that I am directly inspired by the album. I spent at least 10 minutes struggling to figure out how to write disassociation.


End file.
